Delivering the first Dugdale Society occasional paper in 1924, Mary Dormer Harris wrote that William Dugdale ‘the great antiquary grew up to lay the foundation of the history of the city where he had been taught in boyhood’, and that it would be some 150 years later before the history of Coventry was seriously addressed again. She was referring here to Thomas Sharp, the definitive edition of whose work on the history and antiquities of Coventry was published in 1871. Around the same time Benjamin Poole published his own study of the same subject. An important clue lies in the titles of these works. As antiquaries these men had a rather different focus from the local historians of the Dugdale Society. Dormer Harris has a claim to being the first modern historian of Coventry, in that she offered not merely an account of its history and its monuments but an interpretation. Her Life in an Old English Town, first published in 1898, was the basis of the Story of Coventry, her contribution to Dent’s English Towns series, a truly international enterprise covering a large number of great European cities. In her Dugdale paper she proceeded to say that no definite [my italics] history of Coventry could be produced ‘until a number of the more important of the city documents have been printed and brought into play’. And so it has proved to be. The discovery and publication of evidence is of course essential to the historical enterprise, and in this respect the Dugdale Society has played a vital role. But evidence has also to be interpreted, and this is where the local historian comes in. What I want to do in this chapter is to trace how the origins of Coventry have been understood in the intervening years, and how our changing understanding relates to the methods and approaches adopted by historians and archaeologists over the years. In doing this I will attempt to place Coventry’s historiography within wider trends in historical research. The overall effect has been to put increasing scholarly and intellectual demands upon the practising local historian.